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Healthcare Assessment

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The gap between the care patients should get and what they actually receive likely contributes to thousands of preventable deaths each year, and health care systems worldwide continue to face the challenge of delivering quality care at an affordable cost. RAND has conducted research designed to measure and improve health care quality and to provide reliable decision support data to patients, providers, and purchasers.

Being able to provide high-quality health care is a primary driver of job satisfaction among physicians, and obstacles to quality patient care are a source of stress for them. For example, the systems for electronic health records in use today are cumbersome to operate and contribute to their dissatisfaction.

A comprehensive set of well-accepted behavioral health care quality measures—including functional outcome measures—would make it easier to demonstrate the value and impact of behavioral health treatment.

Explore Health Care Quality

To develop and test the psychometric properties of two new survey scales aiming to measure the extent to which the clinical environment supports speaking up about (a) patient safety concerns and (b) unprofessional behavior.

This second of three reports follows the progress of a three-year project intended to support the transformation of federally qualified health centers into advanced primary care practices in support of Medicare beneficiaries.

These findings increase the likelihood that the observed negative responses of South Asian patients to the English General Practice Patient Survey reflect true differences in their experiences of care.

This book provides a scientific and personal perspective on health services research over the last half-century. Its essays and commentaries suggest how that science base can stimulate innovative thinking about ways to improve health care systems.

The aim of this study was to assess reproducibility of the four-category Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System [BI-RADS] density measure and examine its relationship with a continuous measure of percent density.

Antibiotic treatment decisions for medically complex patients are complicated, as the risk of undertreatment may be severe, whereas overtreatment may be associated with adverse effects and the emergence of antibiotic resistant pathogens.

Using tools that help physicians decide whether to use expensive imaging studies such as MRI scans can help reduce the ordering of unnecessary tests, but implementation of the tools in real-world settings has many challenges.

The Medicare short-stay outlier payment policy created a strong financial incentive for long-term care hospitals to time patient discharges to maximize Medicare reimbursement. These results suggest that the new very-short-stay policy implemented in December 2012 could have a similar effect.

RAND's new Center of Excellence on Comparative Health System Performance will study high-performance health systems that translate new evidence into clinical practice. The goal is to identify the most effective ways to disseminate results of patient-centered outcomes research to physicians and health care delivery systems.

As demonstrated in Pennsylvania, conveners of medical home pilots are drawing from their early experiences to refine their intervention designs and improve their effectiveness. Such a learning process is likely to be a critical part of successfully implementing any new model of payment and care delivery.

A medical home intervention that paid bonuses to physician practices based on financial savings showed significant improvements in quality and use of some medical services relative to comparison practices.

Documents the current range of health plans' chronic care management services, identifies best practices and industry trends, and examines factors in the plans' operating environment that limit their ability to optimize chronic care programs.

Using tools that help physicians decide whether to use expensive imaging studies such as MRI scans can help reduce the ordering of unnecessary tests, but implementation of the tools in real-world settings has many challenges.

Researcher Spotlight

Vice President, Global Research Talent

Melissa K. Rowe is vice president of global research talent at the RAND Corporation. She is the president's principal adviser and strategist on developing and sustaining RAND's global research talent base. She directly oversees the operations of RAND's five core research departments, which are…

Economist

Srikanth Kadiyala is an economist with research interests in the areas of health policy and health economics. His particular interests are in cancer screening policy and health insurance effects on health outcomes. Kadiyala's current research is focused on how health insurance affects cancer…

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